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Thierry de Baillon's bilingual musings about the crossing between technology, organizations and human behaviorsMon, 05 Jan 2015 12:47:23 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1The Future of Networks Depends on Technology. Or not.http://www.debaillon.com/2014/12/future-networks-depends-technology-not/
http://www.debaillon.com/2014/12/future-networks-depends-technology-not/#commentsWed, 31 Dec 2014 12:45:08 +0000http://www.debaillon.com/?p=1775Continue reading →]]>The turn of the year is traditionally a period of intense prediction making, and I cannot go wrong today while predicting that the future will be networked. But which future? If we can expect technology to bring us faster, smaller, more connected and more clever tools, devices and algorithms, human psychology doesn’t follow such a straightforward path – I resisted writing “linear”, as the advances of technology rather seem to be power based, if not exponential. History is full of dead ends and periods of regression, and the structures of power and subordination that hold our society together are so deeply engrained into our minds that any cultural or social change is subject to strong resistance, or even to denial.

While evidences of the necessity to change a system that has fostered wealth inequality and deepened social and environmental degradation for more than a century are unveiled every day, most organizations stick with present inefficiency and bureaucracy. Even worse, technology is commonly used to leverage a faster and dumber business as usual. Some of last year’s heroes of an enlightened sharing economy reveal themselves as no better than sweatshops. Is that to say that we are doomed to live in a dystopian future? I don’t think so, but for our heavily hierarchical organizations, the shift toward resilient and wirearchic networks, able to adapt to complexity by enabling the creative and cognitive power of their workforce, won’t take place overnight, despite what many “social something” zealots might say. Information technology, of course, has a major and critical impact on our life, and is here to stay. But believing that collaborative solutions will transform the way businesses create and deliver value, by reshaping the way we work, is as meaningless than hoping that Facebook will change the course of the world. To ignite and sustain the conditions for purposeful networks to grow, we need more. And there is more. But is it the right path?

Stealth

Even if you didn’t see the movie, you might know Minority Report’s famous sequence, in which Tom Cruise is greeted in person by an animated billboard. What was pure science fiction in 1996 is today almost a reality. The tremendous computing power at the disposal of marketers allows them to segment and target consumers at the nearly individual level, and to build context-aware campaigns. Each of our digital footsteps is now tracked, analyzed, then translated behind our back into so-called “interest-based advertising”. We still have the possibility of opting out from some companies’ assaults, but for how long? And to which extent?

As very few organizations care about protecting their internet surfing with an external VPN, through their search history, Google knows what problems they are trying to solve, which prospects they are targeting, what they are buying, selling, when and to who. Today’s internet is the playground of data gatherers, and it is unlikely that, as enterprise networks need more and more to extend their reach beyond organizational boundaries to include customers, partners and suppliers, they extend in the “public” internet space.

In fact, the consumer world is already showing the way. As the web is following the same path as the printed media industry, once almost exclusively informative, then more and more cluttered with promotional and advertising content, people are beginning to protect themselves from marketers’ eyes. Ad blockers plugins and ad removal mobile apps are gaining mainstream traction. As privacy concerns grow, free public VPNs are multiplying, showing increasing trafic, not only from countries where internet access is censored, but also from many Occidental countries. Tor, originally developed and deployed for the US Navy, not only allows people to connect anonymously to the Web, but also extends privacy forward by providing support for hidden web services, invisible outside the Tor network. As inter-organizations networks appear, chances are high, and by large, for the benefits of security and integrity, they will be stealthy.

Health

Among other criteria, the performance of networks is linked to the reliability, the efficiency and speed at which information flows across their links and nodes. The quest for these capabilities was already at the heart of ARPANET, the ancestor of our internet. But while ARPANET’s original transmission protocol, NCP, which was later replaced by TCP/IP, focused on data distribution among links, it took a couple more decades before Napster introduced a truly decentralized way to distribute information. With the birth of peer-to-peer file sharing, appeared the possibility to build resilient digital networks.

One of the main weaknesses of many peer-to-peer networks has been the lack of security, which leaded to the creation of truly anonymous networks, using cryptography to ensure the validity of data exchanged. Other projects, such as Tribler, involve adding anonymity and true decentralization to popular peer-to-peer protocols. Yet, it is only with the development of the blockchain technology, the technology underlying Bitcoin, that truly decentralized networks reached usefulness beyond semi-legal file sharing. By eliminating the need for trusted authorities and regulators in applications like financial transactions or voting systems, blockchain technology may open the way for truly independent networks, freed from external bureaucracies and power. As the founders of Ethereum, one of the projects aimed at developing the technology for other uses, state it:

“This design would allow the DAO to grow organically as a decentralized community, allowing people to eventually delegate the task of filtering out who is a member to specialists, although unlike in the ‘current system’ specialists can easily pop in and out of existence over time as individual community members change their alignments.”

One thing at least is sure: healthy networks are, and operate, in a fully decentralized way.

Wealth

Here comes the tricky part. The wealth of networks – I am not talking about monetary possessions here. The economic dimension of blockchain-like architectures is a whole subject by itself, that I don’t feel qualified enough to tackle – lies in their ability to create value for themselves as a whole, as well as outside of themselves. The technology we see rising aren’t considering networks as a whole, but rather as a collection of individuals aiming at creating value for themselves. By itself, their purely transactional nature reduces the true nature of communities to a caricatural expression, even if some initiatives, like the one Reddit is initiating, aim at leveraging the effect of individual transactions for the benefit of the whole community.

Take trust, for example, which is one of the core intangible assets of communities. Today, trust is a kind of chicken-and-egg problem, in a world in which most of workers are disengaged, and characterized by hardcore individualism and irreducible hedonism. How do we foster fruitful relationships without trust? And how do we restore trust without leveraging genuine intimate relationships? Trust is built interaction after interaction, on the foam of shared expectations and realized premises. Reputation systems, that can be implemented with the latest developments in blockchain architecture, are a just a wee proxy for trust. In fact the blockchain is opening the way for trustless networks…

The wealth of networks isn’t the sum of the wealth of the individuals that compose them. We still need a way to create value for them as a whole from many perspectives, whether this be intellectual property, trust, or any what you could think of collective outcome. From distributed, we have at least to go to cumulative.

Limbo

Systems built on the blockchain architecture are, or can be, stealth, and truly distributed. Yet, they don’t, for now, leverage the possibility to build fruitful networks. On the opposite, they are allowing for the substitution of centralized institutions by faceless, anonymous closed markets. The risk is here, by adopting this range of technologies without challenging ourselves about the basic needs for efficiency in a network-based society, that will transform us into human hamsters, relentlessly spinning a flashy wheel. Banks, the symbols of top-down absolute power, have already understood the opportunity of using the blockchain to their own advantage. If we don’t care, we will soon end up in limbo, kept away from where the shift still has to occur, unable to reach the real tenants of power. Let us not be blinded by technology which may leads to the rise of powerless networks, and instead, let us build the future on what makes us human.

]]>http://www.debaillon.com/2014/12/future-networks-depends-technology-not/feed/0Organizational blindnesshttp://www.debaillon.com/2014/11/organizational-blindness/
http://www.debaillon.com/2014/11/organizational-blindness/#commentsTue, 18 Nov 2014 12:54:45 +0000http://www.debaillon.com/?p=1765Continue reading →]]>In 1970, the scientific journal Nature published a small but important article by Colin Blakemore and Grahame F. Cooper, two neurophysiologists from the University of Cambridge. The article, titled Development of the Brain depends on the Visual Environment, described the results of experiments in which they have raised kittens in a environment in which they were confronted only to horizontal or vertical lines, but not to both. In this context, when growing up, these cats became virtually blind to lines orthogonal to the direction they were exposed to, as their brain adapted to the particular nature of their environment.

Broadening of the Hierarchies

Hierarchies may be as old as the world itself. Yet, whereas primitive societies of hunters-gatherers were egalitarian, their social organization involved many transient hierarchies, allowing them to delegate authority to specific individuals or groups, according to ongoing necessities. The causes and rise of the status hierarchies that are so typical to our societies and organizations isn’t easy to decrypt. In Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies, Benoît Dubreuil has developed an interesting theory linking them to the development of large-scale societies, triggered notably by the development of agriculture, in an era when human beings didn’t have the cognitive faculties necessary to deal with them in an egalitarian way.

Whether we do subscribe to Dubreuil’s theory or not, fact is that power-based hierarchies (where status, as mean of social or economic dominance, becomes a synonym of power) are key to the dominant paradigm that today prevails in most organizations, and that, far from being contained inside the companies’ boundaries, drives most of the production-consumption relationships between businesses and customers. The “we produce, you consume” motto, born in the age of industrialization and mass-markets, is nothing but a generalization of hierarchies, in which customers gave up their ability to think critically over their real needs and to decide on their own consumption patterns, for an accumulation of goods and services manufactured on (or notwithstanding) their behalf. From companies point of view, they became the last link in the production command-and-control chain, with almost no opportunity given to provide feedback (toll free numbers didn’t exist before the end of the 60s) and the single and straightforward “buy” order given.

While shifting from a product orientation to a marketing orientation after World War II, businesses haven’t untied customers from these hierarchical bonds. Quite the opposite, by focusing on and teasing customers’ aspirations, they induced further hierarchical behaviors among them, discretionary economic power translating into conspicuous consumption patterns and social tension. For the sake of growing business and developing companies, the cornucopia unsealed during the Glorious Thirties has become a tyranny of consumption, under which reign has the rigid mindset prevailing in organizations been extended to the customer world. An attitude perfectly symbolized by Patrick Le Lay, CEO of the French television channel TF1, as he stated in 2004 during an interview: “what we are selling to Coca-Cola is minutes of available human brain.”

Dealing with complexity

In the meantime, the world has changed. Drastically. Yesterday’s certainties have disappeared behind arrays of possibilities and fuzzy choices, weaving complex environments in which there is no simple path, no really secure option. Constant streams of information are flowing around us, requesting, to make sense of it, a level of judgment and of knowledge more and more out of the reach of individuals. At the same time, technology allows us to connect and interact with practically no limits, reshaping our consumption behaviors through collaborative learning and distributed intelligence. As complexity increases, we rely more and more on our connections to meaningfully screen and qualify information. Our networks have become our filters.

Organizations, too, have evolved. Mass production has become, for many companies and in many sectors, a shadow from the past. Technology opens new possibilities to better listen to customers, to segment them according to economical, behavioral and social patterns, at the near-individual level, and to craft new channels allowing deeper and more relevant interactions and information exchange.

Yet…

Yet organizations still consider their customers as if they were the bottom level of their internal hierarchies. They keep on believing that, while stuck in a paradigm built on silos, hierarchies, and denial of power to the front line, they can tame customers’ will and expectations. As in Blackmore’s experiments, they act as if, born and grown in a world where hierarchies were the most convenient structure to drive profit and maximize performance, they became unable to see how much the world around them has changed. They behave as if workers were insulated from the outside world, and impervious to the changes that affect us all as human beings. They operate as if rigidity and boxed expertise were able to compete with the imagination and nimbleness of networks of prosumers.

Playing by new rules

In a world where your customers are smarter than you, you are left with no other choice than playing by their rules to survive. Despite what some say, the present rise of a so-called collaborative economy might not represent the future of work, as most of these new companies still operate in a traditional centralized and heavily capitalizing way, harnessing the power of external networks mainly at the advantage of a narrow hierarchy. However, it clearly shows that any industry, every company is now at risk of being disrupted by newcomers able to answer real customers’ needs, as deeply rooted in networks.. From music majors to car rental, from hotels to real estate, the list of such examples is growing day after day.

It is a strange world out there. Trust and credibility are the cornerstones upon which we are processing information, weight suggestions and create knowledge in the midst of our networks. Unless organizations become aware of this new reality, they won’t be able to take advantage of it. What worked in an era of hierarchical production mindset has become irrelevant. Creating value for networked customers requires being able to dive into their networks, and to adhere to their rules and principles, to avoid running the risk of being thrown out like foreign bodies out of a living organism.

For most organizations, it won’t be an easy task. Decades of centralization in search for efficiency, years of capitalistic formatting in search for profit, have ossified their structure into blind hierarchies and one-way chains of power. For them, relying on technology will only enforce the status quo, falling short of enabling any kind of transformation. The solution lies in the power of people. As customers, as human beings, we know how to connect, how to co-create value, socially as well as economically. We are able to do the same as workers. It requires to trust us, to relinquish control, and to commit to build supportive structures. It -only- requires to open the eyes, and to learn how to bear the harsh light of our new reality.

“Look what they done to my song maLook what they done to my songIt’s the only thing I could do alrightAnd they turned it upside downOh ma, look what they done to my song”
– Melanie -

We know the importance of experience, of the accumulation of tips, tricks and shortcuts that nurture our curiosity and our ability to adapt to new situations. Yet, we judge the skills and capabilities of one’s life mostly upon curriculum and diplomas, upon a period of five to eight years. Is that reasonable?

We value creativity, experimentation and intellectual curiosity, yet we ask our youth to abdicate the most creative and innovative part of their life to conform to a formal yoke that we call education. Can we really adapt to an ever changing environment while enforcing such a mechanistic process?

We aim at economic growth. Yet the resources we rely on are finite, if not decaying. The only infinite resource at our disposal is knowledge, yet we leave more and more people, thus more and more sources of knowledge, on the side of the road. Is that sustainable?

We look for, encourage and measure individual performance. Yet, any sport coach knows that collective efficiency is what matters, and that individual performance often gets in the way. Is that sane?

We value our customers. Yet we keep on feeding them with products they don’t need, with the false premise of making their life better, when what really matters is our income. Is that honest?

The world we used to live in no more exists. Yet, all the mechanisms and beliefs that prevailed during the industrial era are still the ones that rule our education system, our organizations, our life. We are still playing the same old song with new lyrics and new instruments, while the need to change the melody becomes more and more obvious. We don’t need new performers anymore. To thrive in today’s world, we need new composers.

]]>http://www.debaillon.com/2014/09/done-song-ma/feed/0Return of Venn – Looking at the Future of Businesshttp://www.debaillon.com/2014/08/return-venn-looking-future-business/
http://www.debaillon.com/2014/08/return-venn-looking-future-business/#commentsFri, 08 Aug 2014 12:33:56 +0000http://www.debaillon.com/?p=1729Continue reading →]]>My last post sparked a few amazing comments. Looking back to the little exercise I attempted – representing organizational structure as Venn diagrams – I realize that my view was a bit enterprise-centric. “Customer”, as a concept, is quite reductive when considering the relationships between individuals and organizations. What if, instead of focusing on the world of work inside companies, we considered the larger context in which work takes place? Work, in fact, is the human activity of producing artefacts – goods and services, of course, but also capital, or knowledge – to allow for exchanges to happen. These kinds of transactions – non-market, if we consider exchanges of knowledge as transactions – have existed since the dawn of humanity, amongst the first tribes of hunters-gatherers, encompassing both physical and symbolic transactions between individuals and the community they belonged to. A straightforward world…

Well, not quite. Starting from the first cut stone, technology has always played a major role in magnifying and extending human capabilities. If we can illustrate the initial transactional context as follows…

… as we navigate in time from prehistory to history, individual interests more and more lost their importance in favor of the collective. Technology began to allow completion of more sophisticated tasks, often requiring more than one individual for being completed. From one-to-one or one-to-many transactions, production mechanisms, fueled by the growing division of labour, turned into many-to-whatever, giving rise to the need for formal structures to optimize technology driven production.

Productivism and organizational disease

With the Industrial Revolution came an important shift: most of technological breakthroughs didn’t empowered individuals, but required a collective structure to deliver. Not only were firms the logical outcome of economical evolution, but they were a natural fit for the rapid evolution of technology occurring during the XIXth century. It would be childish to say that large corporations are born by technological necessity, but fact is, in this pre-unionist era, that most of the resistance to the world of work taking shape wasn’t caused by deteriorating conditions of working, but directly linked to technology, as François Jarrige describes in Face au au monstre mécanique : Une histoire des résistances à la technique. The Luddite uprisings from 1811 in Great Britain is one of many such examples.

At the same time, another major change took place: the emergence of the nation state. By providing a symbolic as well as practical context in which most community-based exchanges could take place -administration, law, education,… – and securing the identity of communities through a distinct and infrangible territory, it freed corporations from their duties toward the communities they belonged to, allowing them to pursue an economical only mission. The complex dynamics of interpersonal relationships involved in traditional transactions, implying reciprocity and feedback loops, disappeared, replaced by markets only dynamics. In this emerging paradigm, people began to be considered according to a dichotomic prism: they became either employees, for the sake of production, or customers, for the sake of transactions. In the most cynical cases, this duality was meant as an autonomous circle; Henry Ford famously raised his employees’ wage, so they could afford to buy his cars.

Building on the diagram from my previous post, here is how we might represent business in the industrial and post-industrial ages:

From this diagram alone, it is easy to deduce the symptoms of today’s organizational disease that we witness around us:

Disengagement from work. Productivism isn’t a human ideal. By reducing employees to production tools, by protecting work from the rest of human activities, organizations have created conceptual and functional strongholds. The premise of recurrent wages isn’t a stirring enough purpose to trigger and sustain involvement in such isolation.

Hardcore individualism. Customer is king, of course, but propelling consumerism for a century has flattered our ego in unprecedented ways. Businesses have operated in an apparent paradox: to propel mass-production, they have pandered to -an created- individuals’ needs and expectations in a more and more targeted way, encouraging conspicuous consumption and fostering devious hedonistic behaviors. By playing sorcerer’s apprentices, organizations have have allowed this individualistic mindset to blossom inside their walls, facilitated by hierarchical structures and concentration of power.

Yet, a totally new breed of technology has appeared, disrupting industrial age behaviors even faster than precedent technological milestones have helped in shaping them. For the first time in history, a device, the personal computer, when associated to the internet, has become both a tool of production and a tool of consumption, challenging the producer-consumer relationship on which the industrial paradigm was based, erasing the lines carefully drawn between work and other activities, freeing individuals from this dichotomy, allowing them to think differently over their own role and to relentlessly connect with each other.

As no surprise, most of the technologies built upon this breakthrough derive from this awareness and share common traits:

They are personal. Unlike technologies from the industrial age, they are built for the individual, and don’t require heavy infrastructure or strong coordination to be operated. Organizations, in fact, struggle when trying to adapt them to their own command-and-control mindset, stifling their outdated notion of productivity.

They are adaptive. As Manuel Castells explains, the networks that information technologies enable doesn’t warrants by itself their superiority over centrally structured hierarchical organizations. Their advantage comes from the flexibility, the ability to adapt to changing environments to “de-center performance and share decision making” according to the context they allow.

They are multi-purpose. These technologies are themselves networked and modular, giving individuals unprecedented ways to make them fit any purpose, and to use them to address goals beyond production or consumption only. Unlike precedent technologies, their impact on the society is not predetermined, and lies on the will of those who use them, for better or for worse.

Hyper-connectivity and dynamic reallocation of resources based on trust are the main characteristics of the new, networked, world unveiling in front of our eyes, allowing the rise of micro-markets and the re-appropriation of production by individuals , who have become both producers and customers.

Our society’s infrastructure, fitted to the precedent centralized paradigm, is slow to adapt. Our compensation-based world of work, backed up by an omnipotent banking system, is curbing our ability to fully embrace a network-based economy. Our nation states which, after having favored the domination of the mechanistic corporation, could paradoxically be a key actor in the rise of a prosumer world, are now too weak to take over this role.

Yet, it is only a matter of time. In our recessing economies, the movement toward individualization and self-determination is hitting the job market, as part-time and contractual work make up a growing part of the workforce. The future of business is about an organization’s capability to create value from, for, and inside networks. The kind of linked structures businesses are more and more forming in the midst of their ecosystem is not flexible enough to avoid the risk of being disrupted by emergent outcomes from the rising collaborative economy. To avoid this disruption, organizations have little if no choice. Internally, they have to behave as networks to adapt to their environment, thus to embrace the organizational principles of wirearchy. Externally, they must act as nodes in the larger networks making up our communities as well as our society: purposeful, supportive and trustworthy. For many businesses, it is a long way to go. But it is the kind of world we, as human beings, have already started living in.

]]>http://www.debaillon.com/2014/08/return-venn-looking-future-business/feed/1Venn’s Adventures in the Future of Workhttp://www.debaillon.com/2014/07/venns-adventures-future-work/
http://www.debaillon.com/2014/07/venns-adventures-future-work/#commentsFri, 04 Jul 2014 06:48:14 +0000http://www.debaillon.com/?p=1707Continue reading →]]>A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at BPM Conference Portugal by Alberto Manuel, its chairman and delightful host. My talk focused on the inability for business processes to adequately address real world problems, either from a knowledge worker’s point of view, or from a customer’s point of view. In that sense, organizations, workers and customers live in different worlds, each with its own language, its own behaviors and expectations.

During a chat on the next day while waiting for our planes, Chris Potts, who delivered a brilliant presentation on enterprise architecture, made me a great suggestion: why not summarizing these three conceptions of work through a Venn diagram? This moment of truth made a long way into my thinking: what would be the best representation of business-as-a-Venn-diagram?

Representing the pre-industrial world of work is quite straightforward.

With the industrial revolution, the world of work, under the influence of key technologies and of fast growing corporations, transformed itself rapidly. These technologies allowed for unheard performance boosts, and for heavy rationalization of products and services. With the need -and will- to standardize the means of production, came the for standardizing work itself. Here is what organizations in a transactional world look like.

Today, the game has changed. In a world riddled with complexity and drowned in hyper-connectivity, shaken by the emergence of collaborative cultural and economic consumption patterns, this diagram is definitely outdated. Yet how do we represent the present world of work, fragmented by technology, torn between a leadership ideal and productive necessity? Have a look on how many of enterprise 2.0 and social business protagonists and thinkers represent the forces at work in today’s businesses.

Problem is… this representation is definitely flawed, for at least two reasons.

Where is the customer gone?

This Peter Drucker’s quote couldn’t be enough repeated: “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.” Customers aren’t only the purpose, but also the engine and the gas of organizations. The force behind most of the changes that organizations are facing today comes from the consumer world; not only have they now to cope with new consumption behaviors, but they more and more run the risk of being disrupted by their own customers. Whether they want it or not, customers are now organizations’ main stakeholder. If businesses don’t transform themselves, their customers will do without them; they are already creating new ways to make, share and consume.

Technology is not a subject, or rather not the one we think

Facilitating the adoption of new technologies and the emergence of work behaviors enabled by these technologies seems to be the lingua franca of transforming organizations. But let us step back for a while. Can we seriously admit, without challenging our assumptions, that the people who struggle to use collaborative platforms in the course of their work are the same who casually play with more computing power than what was available at NASA twenty years ago? I am not talking here of some happy fews, but of more than 1.7 billion smartphone owners, who routinely jump over the trough of disillusionment as over an annoying gutter. If technology has become such an important hurdle in the evolution of the business world, it might well be not because people struggle to adopt the behaviors we expect in an enabled workplace, but because we don’t provide them with the tools they really need.

The real topic related to technology lies at the interface between the company and its customers. Automatization has streamlined a myriad of transactional operations and, as more and more objects get connected – according to Gartner, the Internet of Things will grow to 26 billions connected objects by 2020 – most of these operations are taking place without human interaction, raising a new challenge for organizations.

Maintaining homogeneity in all these machine-to-machine interactions and providing the components for a transparent, seamless customer experience in a self-service world will become increasingly complex, leveraging the need for tightening authentic and meaningful conversations with customers. The heart of organizations doesn’t beat in their center, but at their boundaries. The necessary transformation they will have to undergo to thrive, or simply to survive, will take place at the interface between their structure, their people and their customers. If the future of work is a Venn diagram, here is what it looks like.

If you are interested, here is my presentation from the BPM Conference.

I always have been an ardent supporter of true qualitative research. Yet, data IS interesting, specially when, considered under the right angle, it helps shedding a light on otherwise unnoticed facts and behaviors.

A number is a number is a number
Emanuele Quintarelli, when presenting the results of the Social Collaboration Survey he recently conducted among 300 Italian companies, exposed such numbers, which curiously were barely commented, during the recent Enterprise 2.0 Summit (you can have a look to his presentation here). He, and his colleague Stefano Besana, found out that middle management is not the problem we all thought it was. On average, it represents a problem for less than 20 percent of companies having undergone a social business initiative. Wow… A fast and dirty interpretation of this finding would be to correlate it with the now (in)famous prediction from the Gartner Group saying that 80 percent of social business efforts will fail, and to assert that old thinking — introducing social with a project mindset, something easily understandable and actionable at middle management level — fails in reshaping businesses to adapt to our new hyper connected reality.

While intellectually flattering, as it nurtures our believing in the necessity for a cultural and behavioral change, making such a correlation would be a fraud. 80 percent of middle managers seing value in social means that part of them are adopting new leadership traits in their behavior (Emanuele’s survey in fact shows that half of companies, on average, think that their culture fits social initiatives). If so, how may we interpret the dreadful level of disengagement (63 per cent worldwide) among employees reported by Gallup?

When structure trumps culture

More than culture, organizational structure imposes constraints on our behaviors. Going even further, organizational culture might be defined as the set of behaviors which develop over time along the interplay of these constraints. As John Wenger insightfully pointed out:

“I’m often fascinated by how people, when they walk through the door of their workplaces, adopt behaviors akin to the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome. Despite knowing in our hearts and in our guts that much of how workplaces operate is nonsensical and even anti-human, we maintain the charade that it’s the best way of doing things. As Alan Moore points out in No Straight Lines, industrial systems were not designed with human needs at their heart, yet we still organise workplaces along such lines. We go along with the deceit that doing things in a mechanistic, command-and-control way is the right way to do things.”

In many cases, the “victimization” of unengaged employees isn’t caused by, or targeted toward colleagues and managers, but toward the system itself, which structure embodies a deterministic set of constraints. Restoring goodwill requires much more than changing management’s mindset, it calls for a reweaving of the formal structure of organizations. Structure and culture are intimately linked, and at the end of the day, they all relate to relationships between people. As Dan Pontefract wrote in Flat Army:

“… organizational culture is defined by one criterion, and one only: an organization’s culture is defined by the manner in which employees are treated by their direct leader.”

I won’t discuss here the superiority of networks over industrial era hierarchies as organizational model, many others have brilliantly discussed it, you can for example read these recent posts by Jon Husband or Oskar Berg. Yet, a crucial question remains: does a networked organizational structure intrinsically trigger employee engagement?

Sadly, the answer seems negative. There are still few plausible case studies of companies exhibiting —and living— this kind of structure: Gore, Valve, Automatic, and some others, but they all share a common attitude toward employee engagement: they hire individuals who fit their internal culture, and are particularly cautious about the personality and mindset of new hires. When setting up the right structure, they tend more to protect the corresponding culture than to assimilate dissent elements. Indirectly, they all prove that, if a network-based structure enables engagement and collaboration by leveraging trusted relationships, it doesn’t help that much in restoring motivation from disengaged employees.

Workplace psychosis 2.0

Companies’ culture is evolving; in some cases, their structure is beginning — albeit slowly — to change, but the level of disengagement keeps on increasing. To counter this inexorable trend, some companies are beginning to adopt new behaviors: ROWE human resources approach, BYOD policies, better work-life balance,… but is there any tangible evidence that those are really enhancing engagement?

In a parallel to the rise of industrialization, in our Western societies, the XIXth century has seen our lives being more and more tightly structured and partitioned: work, family, religion, leisure, have grown into social and behavioral “boxes” which, for many people, were largely disconnected one from another. This social, moral, and ontological evolution even reflected itself in the thinking of the time. For example, in Ancient Society, Lewis Henry Morgan, one of the founders of anthropology, described social evolution as a set of patterns belonging different domains: technology, subsistence, marriage, family and political organization.

Today, all, but one, of these personal, social and political boxes which prevailed in the XIXth century have disappeared, in a global transformative movement, accelerated by the internet and the rise of networks. Technology is now pervasive, and affordable to anyone. Family is no more the infrangible nucleus it was hundred years ago, and marriage is no more the reference point of human lives. Political minorities take now their own voice, whichever it is, and the class struggle is merely memories in hedonistic and individualistic societies. Work, instead, has remained the last “reserved” domain, in which people still think and behave differently than in any other situation of a life characterized by social and cultural continuous hybridation. This fracture is less physical, as telework and freelance contracting develops, than psychological, as work codes greatly differ from the ones from our private life, as the nature of work moves away from its outcomes, and gets more and more abstract.

This situation sheds a new light on the lack of engagement, in organizations attempting to adopt more flexible internal rules and to entice employees to bring more of their personality and creativity into the workplace. Being a more complete self in a disconnected, self-contained, workplace, while living a more and more demanding and connected life externally, exhibits all the traits of a split personality disorder. In other words, organizations trying to socialize processes tailored (Taylored) to an industrial-era operational mentality, or to add a social layer to an otherwise closed system, are, slowly but steadily, growing workplace psychosis 2.0.

The nature of the firm, redux

Isn’t there any hope left, beside a radical erase-and-redesign move? Yes, there is. Beside culture and structure, and even beyond them, organizations have to rethink about their nature. I have previously written that the dominant transactional purpose of organizations, famously explained by Ronald Coase, is becoming an economic nonsense. For more than a century, they have grown on top of our society, draining tangible and intangible resources for their own sake, up to the point they have become totally closed systems, subject to growing entropy.

Instead of fighting for a shrinking piece of profit, organizations have to learn how to be useful again to the society which nurtures them, beyond shareholders’ interests, and to become the thriving engines of a global circular economy. To regain sustainability in the new world we see emerging, companies must rethink their own purpose, and will have to switch from an onward, quasi parasitic, to an outward, symbiotic, attitude. The schizophrenia route is definitely a no go. Instead of requiring even more from employees, they are urged to open the doors, and to show them that they care about the world, the society, the city, the life in which they operate.

For sure, most people want to get their work done the best they can, but this only if this work gives sense to their life, and if they are able to feel that this sense is shared among coworkers. Instead of trying to weave socializing behaviors with obsolete business mechanisms, let your employees know you care about your customers, and give them tools to support this. Let them know you care about broader, deeper issues, and help them getting involved in resolving the problems they tackle in their real, external, life. This was the lesson that my friend and colleague from Change Agents WorldwideCéline Schillinger brilliantly gave us during the Enterprise 2.0 Summit: her “Women in Sanofi Pasteur” internal movement grew on the premise of helping to solve the gender balance issue at work, a problem which isn’t limited to the internal corporate world, and the initiative flourished through external recognition. Her success shows that, in order to get more from their employees and contractors, in order to re-engage them, organizations must, simply, give them more. Not as employees, but as human beings. Not in the workplace, but in their life. Let us open the doors of the confined world of work, it needs fresh air. Right now.

We all know (or should know) that any social initiative should start with a concrete, tangible business problem to be solved. “Selling social”, whichever the tool that will be used, requires a thorough understanding of the problem to solve and of the weaknesses and strengths in presence. It comes with the impervious necessity to change the way companies believe work is done to align it with how work is really done: collaboratively, along the path of ad hoc interactions and iterations, back and forth between stakeholders who often only have a partial view of the problem to be solved. It also comes with the premise of more efficiency, of better operational performance. Yet…

Yet, once a company crosses the Rubicon, the reality kicks in dreadfully. Some key stakeholders are unable to use the technology because of strict firewall rules or legal compliance. ISO 9xxx forbid users from seing some relevant content. Video messaging is riddled by the poor bandwidth available. War rooms are only available 9 to 11 on Thursdays. Meetings cannot be recorded, thus zeroing out efforts invested in the planning of a series of webinars. Some manager, who doesn’t see the value he could get from it, dismiss the communication plan. This list could go on forever, and everyone who has ever worked in a large company has some items to add. It certainly helps consultants in allowing them to contract many days of consulting services to raise flags around them, but it overall demonstrates how broken our organizations are.

You may perhaps call me an idealist, but when a man’s kneecaps are worned-out by carrying heavy loads for too long, replacing them with state of the art prothesis a weak solution. When businesses are getting too big too remember that they are all about people, that technology, processes, and even organizational structures are just enablers, the society is in trouble. Productivists’ efforts to change the reality by socializing (cough) it look too much like another Zeno’s paradox, as incremental change won’t drive us past the sad reality we are witnessing day after day: beyond the poor state of what work means for many of us, think of exhaustion of natural resources, demise of human creativity and willingness, growing disparity of wealth,… Time has come to rethink not only the way we work, but the purpose and nature of firms. Time to introduce, as John Wenger said yesterday, to introduce sociology and psychology in our approach and thinking. Time to break the reality barrier, to help leading conscious organizations toward Wirearchy or Thin Organizations.

It will be a long journey, for sure. But the path is now opened, as guilds like Change Agents Worldwide or Corporate Rebels United now exist to help us pave the way for others to follow and expand. I’d wished I had them by my side some years ago. As Anatole France once said: “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”

]]>http://www.debaillon.com/2014/02/breaking-reality-barrier-social-business-style/feed/1The Broken Business Model of Businesshttp://www.debaillon.com/2013/11/broken-business-model-business/
http://www.debaillon.com/2013/11/broken-business-model-business/#commentsWed, 06 Nov 2013 14:34:34 +0000http://www.debaillon.com/?p=1663Continue reading →]]>Every day, we can see new evidences that our society is broken. More than ever, we live on the edge of an era, without knowing if the present unstable equilibrium will collapse into a dystopian future or lead us to a better world. The digital revolution grants us instant access to informational cornucopia, while slowly weaving around us an universal virtual panopticon. Technology, at the very same time it allows the rise of collective intelligence, is accelerating the dawn of many professions. The landscape of work is rapidly shifting, but are we aiming at the right target? Today, I feel more assailed by doubt than filled with confidence…

Changing the way we work is a promise supported by many interesting initiatives. The MIX (Management Innovation eXchange), ignited by Gary Hamel, has the ambition to reinvent management for the 21st century. Hacking Work, initiated by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein in their book, aim at “Business Innovation, One Hack at a Time” More recently, Stowe Boyd has launched his own effort, named Chautauqua from the eponymous adult education movement popular in the end of the 19th century, while Chris Heuer and Rawn Shah both call for a gathering of Work Hackers. Yet, as empowering and insightful these initiates are, I still feel a bit uneasy with them. Isn’t redesigning work too much of a company-centric approach? Can we keep on considering organizational reengineering without taking into account the millions of people left aside by what we call “employment” in our thinking?

Opening the doors

At the micro level, present initiatives seem stuck inside the walls of organizational strongholds.Many discussions around the future of work converge on the necessity to allow for more fluidity and freedom in the way work is done. Yet, in the meantime, outside of organizations, agriculture excepted, freelance work is declining year after year. Shouldn’t the world of work being looked at from a wider perspective?. Each worker is also a customer and a networked individual in a hyper-connected world. As work and life get more and more interwoven, considering work as a distinct activity becomes less and less sustainable. If we want to change the world of work, it is time to consider that “worker” is now getting as obsolete as “housewife”, and to consider that the power to change the game is already at work, but outside companies’ boundaries. The challenge isn’t that much about reinventing job descriptions, teamwork or outdated evaluations systems than about reconciling the way we behave inside the workplace and the one we behave at home. The outside-in force to transform business is here, if only organizations open their doors.

A broken business model

At the macro level, the real economy, the global exchange of products and services, has become a poor man’s economy, representing less than 3% of the total amount of foreign exchange transactions. In such a context, most of our attempts to transform organizations will break against the glass ceiling of shareholder value. As long as maximizing performance to deliver more profit for capital markets will be the (only) name of the game, organizations will stay the same. For instance, employee engagement is a generally accepted pillar of the needed transformation, but for which outcome? I guess that for anyone who will answer “to learn better and faster”, nine others would say “to be more productive”, with a typical industrial bias. Work is no more an asset in the production mechanism, but a commodity for which cost has to be optimized.

Some Few organizations have succeeded in developing more egalitarian and informal structures, but even fewer have avoided the present capitalist logic, geared toward wealth creation for financial markets. In The Business Model Innovation Factory, Saul Kaplan gave this definition of a business model: “the way an organization, creates, delivers and captures value.” Business, as a whole, captures much more value than it creates, wether it be for organizations themselves, for the individuals working for them, or for the society at large, and delivers it through speculative markets. As Keynes wrote:

“As the organization of investment markets improves, the risk of the predominance of speculation does however increase. Speculators do no harm as bubbles on a sea of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes the by-product of the activities of a casino, the job (of capitalism) is likely to be ill done.”

In other words, even more than work, the business model of business is broken. Fixing work, under this lighting, is no more than an attempt to redefine the way business, as a whole, delivers value. Yet, the two other aspects of a business model, how value is created and captured, remain mostly ignored.

Rethinking how value is created and captured

To redefine business in a sustainable way, organizations should now consider how, and for who they create value. Considering individuals, not only as workers, but as the main resources they have to take care of, is less part of work redefinition than of a larger global evolution of business toward what I have called Thin Organizations. Under many aspects, Keynes’ era is now bygone, and with it the notion of stable nation-states. Businesses should now begin to understand that the power they have is not only economic, and give back to the society which seeds their growth. The regain of interest in public-private partnerships for the development of civil infrastructures, and the rise of the newer public-private-community partnerships, which take a more holistic approach to societal problem solving such as education or water management, are by no mean a coincidence.

The nexus of business, of course, is profit. The real economy needs capital beyond the simple transaction of goods and services, in order to ensure stability and growth beyond its financial signification. Problem is, this capital is now drowned into the speculative game. The financial crisis we are living for five years now has opened the eyes of many governments, which recognize that too intense speculation puts the whole system at risk. From Paul Volcker’s proposal to European pressure on EU states to separate banking activities, and to Swiss present SVP lawmakers effort, most Occidental countries are today blowing their whistle.

Yet, this would only protect the economy to be biased by the use of the most sophisticated financial tools, such as high-frequency trading and hedges funds, but wouldn’t keep organizations away from being instrumented at shareholders’ will, and sometimes even to exhibit some sort of Stockholm syndrome toward them. The world would be quite different if, as Jon Husband told me during an interview for the Future of [Collaborative] Enterprise project,

“instead of going private on to the capital markets through an IPO, if Facebook had decided to create itself as some sort of not-for-profit collective, still of the same size providing a platform that a billion people can use, but without trying to enrich its founders and its shareholders in the same way. Now that would have been something really innovative for our society. It would have been a platform for some kind of evolution of humans on the planet.”

Is there a cure for the curse? It is way too soon to know, but on the optimistic side, some initiative, such as the B Corp movement, are giving us a glimpse of a different, more sustainable, economy. Alternative currencies, too, might provide a framework for a purposeful economy. In this field, everything is still to be invented. Would this lead to separate currencies for the speculative economy, as I suggested in an exchange on this blog with Susan Scrupski and Joachim Stroh, who invited me to join Change Agents Worldwide? Who knows… Fact is, if we really want change the world of work, we will have to tackle the full business model of business.

]]>http://www.debaillon.com/2013/11/broken-business-model-business/feed/1The Stopcock and the New Economyhttp://www.debaillon.com/2013/09/stopcock-new-economy/
http://www.debaillon.com/2013/09/stopcock-new-economy/#commentsMon, 02 Sep 2013 11:12:11 +0000http://www.debaillon.com/?p=1606Continue reading →]]>For once, I would like to tell you a little story. When, my wife and me, we arrived the other day at our country house, we found a little letter from our water supply company in the letterbox. It merely said that, having been unable to read the meter for several years, they had cut water supply. The water meter, which is located inside the garden, thus behind a closed gate, is usually read once a year. Before we met, my wife lived there for several years, but we now occupy the house only for weekends and some holidays. Needless to say, we keep on consciously paying the monthly bill based on the last meter reading, and, frankly, as our water consumption seriously decreased, I guess that the water company owes us a bunch of money back.

The problem is the company’s representatives never work on Saturday, and there is no way to communicate the index remotely or by whatever other method conceivable: online, by phone, by mail or by carrier pigeon. Furthermore, meter reading is usually done in July, when many people are away from home. Access to water being an inalienable right, French law provides the obligation to provide people who don’t pay their bill with a limited access; yet, there is no such a law for the inability to read the meter for two consecutive years, so they just cut the water supply.

July was really hot here, and since we had no way to wash dishes or take a shower, we decided to live the place. The house is located in a small village, where everyone more or less knows each other, and my wife was also member of the City Council while she lived there all year round. On our way back, we passed by the village hall, in front of which stood the mayor and some other people. We stopped to say hello, and told them our stupid story. “So you paid the bill?”, said the mayor, “it’s crazy that they cut the water supply. Don’t worry, we have the wrench to open the stopcock. Wait for me, I’ll open it for you.” A few minutes later, he was back with a huge T-shaped wrench, and water was soon able to flow again…

A tidal wave called life

This little story, I guess, perfectly illustrates today’s world and the environment we all live in. On one side, organizations, crippled with rigid operational procedures and abstract business processes, are losing grasp of their customers’ behaviors, needs and expectations. On the other side, we are more and more organizing into informal local networks, overcoming the structural deficiency of the organizations supposed to provide us with the basic services we rely on (think of banks, energy supply, telcos, real estate, transportation; think of governments, public agencies; think of the latest customer service hell you experienced). We connect, interact, borrow, share, help each other according to our capabilities and goodwill. Local communities are the new black, as Jon Husband just commented on Facebook. They are our answer to the uncertainty and complexity of the world we live in. In fact, they always were. From immemorial ages, people have gathered into tribes to survive into hostile environments. While social media adds a new, global and instantaneous, dimension to our need of belonging, it yet only represents the foam of a deep and seething phenomena: a tidal wave called life.

Many organizations have grown in a world of certainty and regularity which doesn’t fit ours any more. Most business behaviors are still built for an era of standardized consumption and predictable growth. Productivity, competitiveness, profitability, all these words which govern the corporate realm, have a strong flavor of linearity which is no more relevant in our tomorrow-is-really-another-day age. Blindfolded by their own survival, many organizations have lost contact with the real world, and the gap is widening between the way they operate and the way their customers live. Not only is this behavior a structural fallacy, but it is also an economical suicide. Millions, if not billions, are wasted everyday on useless and nonsensical procedures; in my little story, we were charged for the intervention of the representative who closed the stopcock, but the fine hardly covered the time spent (he surely had to look for the stopcock, hidden into vegetation, for a while), the gas burnt and the depreciation of the car, it was clearly a lose-lose situation.

Local communities, not customers

Customer experience and big data are becoming hot topics, meaning that organizations are beginning to realize that things are getting wrong. Alas, they are still trying to feed new insights into old mechanisms: behavioral targeting is much less about behaviors than it is about targeting, and social media is merely a new fancy route to customer service hell. For sure, businesses know their customers better and better, as we are leaving more and more footprints online, and as the technology required to correlate all this data is at our disposal. But is knowing the same as… understanding? Definitely not.

One doesn’t learn cabinetmaking in a book. Like with any craft, you have to watch a cabinetmaker working, to talk with him, to try by yourself under his supervision, to fully understand what he does and why he does that. The same holds true with customers. To understand them, organizations will have to walk with them to learn what jobs they are trying to get done. Most businesses have to redesign the way they conceive and think of service, to connect back to the real world and provide their customers with meaningful products and services. As recently wrote Helen Clarkson, Director of the Forum for the Future:

“But overall we know that our current economic paradigm is not sustainable. That’s why at Forum we talk about creating #theBIGshift – a change to a new paradigm. This means finding ways for the washing machine manufacturer to find a sustainable business model (leasing the machines and being the recipient of my quarters, for example) rather than panic and send out the salesmen.”

But, albeit necessary, this alone isn’t sufficient. Our present view of the rise of a new sharing economy is still tainted with precepts from the past. Instead of thinking about customers, we should start to think about the local communities which form to compensate for businesses’ inability to adapt to their customers’ expectations. Instead of selling, renting, or whatever-business-modeling TO them (old marketers’ reflex die hard), businesses should reshape themselves into thin organizations, in order to build business WITH them. What if, instead of wasting money because of obsolete procedures, our water providing company had delegated to local governments the power to turn supply on and off? What if, instead of considering local communities as customers, organizations begin to support them actively, considering them as active stakeholders of a more sustainable economy?

]]>http://www.debaillon.com/2013/09/stopcock-new-economy/feed/4The Thin Organization, Part III: From Social to Socialhttp://www.debaillon.com/2013/05/the-thin-organization-from-social-to-social/
http://www.debaillon.com/2013/05/the-thin-organization-from-social-to-social/#commentsTue, 28 May 2013 16:19:18 +0000http://www.debaillon.com/?p=1574Continue reading →]]>Co-evolution of organizations, technology and people is even more a fact we have to assess and embrace than a necessity. Yet, most of present social business anthems focus more on the adoption of emerging technologies, to cope with the change happening in our life, as consumers or as employees, than with core organizational change, implying that adaptation will follow adoption, diving into causal illusion.

Structural or anecdotal change?

In many places – with just a touch of caricature -, business transformation is reduced to setting back the customer and the employee side by side in the front passenger seat, after having let them in the back seat for many years, while driving a car powered by the same four-stroke internal combustion engine. In its recent paper, Social Business Patterns, IBM states that:

“A social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value. Social businesses connect individuals, so they can rapidly share information, knowledge and ideas by having conversations and publishing informal content. They analyze social content from multiple channels and sources, in addition to structured data, to gain insights from both external and internal stake- holders.”

“Organizations moving into this stage [the Converged state, defined as ‘Business is Social’] are driven by a vision that articulates how social media and digital overall improves customer and employee relationships and experiences.”

But we live in an era which sees many business models doomed with obsolescence, customers swiftly changing their consumption patterns, economic structures collapsing, employees disengaged at an alarming rate. In such a situation, isn’t then transforming processes into, or enhancing them with, conversations a rather lame objective for organizational evolution ? Business has always been done with people for people; and setting people back in the driver seat is the real and only way to go. Focusing, as we do, on “social” as an enabler, is putting emphasis on anecdotal, rather than structural, change.

In reality, a deeper transformation is already at work. Organizations transform themselves, following either an evolutionary or revolutionary path. They always did, in fact, and “the trajectory toward Smart/Social Business/Enterprise 2.0 began decades ago with the shift towards ‘the learning factory’ model“, as Anne Marie McEwan put it in her book Smart Working – Creating the Next Wave. Looking at past, and present, experiments and initiatives from a people-centric (employees as well as customers) view, can help us in envisioning successive stages in organizational future.

The connected organization

“Connected companies are not hierarchies, fractured into unthinking, functional parts, but holarchies: complex systems in which each part is also a fully-functional whole in its own right. A holarchy is a different kind of template than the modern, multidivisional organization. It’s podular.”

This epigraph from Dave Gray’s book, The Connected Company, says it all. To be able to adapt both to customers’ changing needs and to competitive pressure, organizations should adopt a decentralized cooperative model, and develop the ability to build strategic as well as operational ad hoc “alliances”. This model isn’t new, far from that. The Italian industry, for instance, has been dominated by small (70% of Italian workers work for firms having fewer than 100 employees), family-owned businesses, able to cluster on opportunistic opportunities. This structural agility, combined with a high focus on informal and continuous learning, has proved itself to be highly successful since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

More recent examples abound. Tom Peters has extensively written about companies like Union Pacific Railroad, which reinvented itself during the 80s by breaking up into small inter-related units. Kyocera Corp., a US$ 13 billion revenue Japanese ceramics and electronics manufacturer, has structured itself as a multitude of small customer-focused business units.

The porous organization

As responsive and adaptive as it can be, the connected organization lacks the capability to understand its customers “from the inside”, to meaningfully cope with abrupt and always faster shifts in markets’ orientations and customers’ needs. To understand customers’ job-to-be-done, companies will need to evolve further, and to directly integrate them into their processes, to make them integral part of the business ecosystem. Co-design, service design, are some of of the fields of practice which aim at setting the final user at the center of the stage. But this trend toward building multi-sided ecosystems, toward nurturing a symbiosis beneficial to all stakeholders, outside as well as inside the organization, is even more acute in the B2B world, where such evolution already exist.

Consider for instance the Suppliers Team Volvo Cars Human Resources Management Forum, which brings together HR representatives from the Volvo Cars Belgian assembly plant and some twenty suppliers, allowing them to openly share human resources issues and opportunities. Greg Lloyd, President and co-founder of Traction Software, gave me another example when, for the Future of [Collaborative] Enterprise project, he described the way Boeing was used to exchange entire teams with its suppliers for a limited time, to better understand each other needs and operational practices.

The thin organization

Restructured for nimbleness, tied to customers’ satisfaction and suppliers’ prosperity, organizations will have to deal, not only with dissolving boundaries, having to orchestrate resources they won’t own anymore, but also with the influence this evolution will exert on people. Remember, we are in a coevolutionary world, and while porous organizations will conform to the organizational structure observed and described by Ranjay Gulati and David Kletter in Shrinking Core, Expanding Periphery: The Relational Architecture of High Performing Organizations, they might have to aim at even deeper transformation to thrive, or even to survive, in the era of “worksumers”, of individuals who more and more are considering work, as well as products and services consumption, as activities less and less differentiated, fully integrated into an hyper-connected life.

When such dilution occurs, and it WILL occur, the very notion of organization will have to evolve. Responsive and adaptive customer-centricity in the worksumption era will morph into symbiosis, an ultimate form of win-win co-evolutionary relationship.

Social, in our not-so-private life, is teaching us that getting is giving, and new partnerships, which already begin to take place, will have to form between the entities which structure our lives: public/private, economic/political, leisure/professional. Successful companies will depart from the present view of profit as a private, financial only asset in the hands of shareholders, by enforcing its socially cohesive dimension, in a model somehow close to German capitalism. They will have to assume their role in non-directly-professional domains, whether it be in education, urban development, or preservation of environment. They will become social, in the original sense of it.

We can already see a few example of companies this ultimate stage of transformation, like Zappos and its Downtown Las Vegas project, or Compuware and Detroit’s Edible Gardens. “Social media will be like air“, once said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group. Yet, the “social” she was talking about were the technologies supporting the evolving lattice of our relationships. The successful companies of tomorrow will, in turn, become thin organizations, weaving with worksumers the kind of relationships supported by a Wirearchy, as defined by Jon Husband:

“a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on trust, knowledge, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology.”

Hierarchies won’t disappear. They will maintain the core structure of organizations, like the engine powering a car, whoever the driver is. This comes at a risk: power and authority flows can be gamed, and hijacked at the benefit of few. Whether it becomes enabler of a better life, or Big Brother of a dull future, the becoming of the thin organization definitely belongs to us.